In the z/OS operating system, the Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) describes an access method as well as various structures for organizing data. Some of these various structures can contain key-sequenced VSAM data sets. For VSAM data sets that are indexed by keys, the z/OS operating system provides both an index and a data component. The index contains information to locate and access information of the data component in storage devices. The data component often contains information that is considered personal and/or confidential. Frequently, the index is keyed using the personal or confidential information from the data component because a unique key is necessary to index the information in the data component.
If a data component becomes corrupted (e.g., a key in the index does not properly identify a location of a corresponding record in the data component), both the index and the data component must be analyzed to determine the source of the corruption. However, data privacy is becoming increasingly important, and service providers are ever more worried about the personal/confidential information of their customers becoming public, and are therefore reluctant to turn over the VSAM data set to be analyzed by a third party. Additionally, government regulations may restrict access and data retention for data sets that contain personal/confidential information.